Srinagar, Feb 7: The Jammu and Kashmir Police will soon file a charge sheet against three persons, including a juvenile, in the recent Srinagar acid attack case to ensure exemplary punishment for them and to create deterrence among those having such “barbaric” tendencies, a top police officer said on Monday.
Inspector General (Kashmir range) Vijay Kumar also appealed to girls and their parents to inform police in time if anyone is stalking or harassing them.
On February 1, a man accompanied by a juvenile allegedly threw acid on a 24-year-old woman after she rejected his marriage proposal, an incident that shook entire Srinagar and drew widespread condemnation from across society.
The victim was sent to a Chennai eye hospital for specialised treatment on Monday. She had recorded her statement, an important piece of documentation that would help police in filing the charge sheet, before a magistrate on Saturday.
Kumar told PTI that the investigation is nearly complete and “we would soon complete the process by filing a charge sheet in this case.”
“The investigation is being conducted professionally and scientifically to make it a foolproof case so that the culprits are punished by setting an example and deterrence is created among elements having such barbaric tendency,” he said.
The officer appealed to girls and their parents to inform police at an early stage if any miscreant is stalking or harassing them so that action can be taken.
Giving a rundown of the probe into the February 1 incident, Senior Superintendent of Police (Srinagar) Rakesh Balwal, a 2012-batch IPS officer from Manipur, said, “As we received the information (about the incident), a special team was immediately constituted and we were able to nab the culprits within 24 hours of the shocking incident.”
In her police statement, the woman gave details of the clothes worn by the accused. A police team rushed to the residence of the accused and found those clothes concealed in a bed cavity, he said.
Initially, the main accused gave wishy-washy answers to police on the procurement of sulfuric acid. After he finally named the shop from where he got the acid, it was sealed for violating the Supreme Court guidelines on the storage and sale of acids.
“Initially, the main accused tried to mislead us on the procurement of acid claiming that he had taken it out from the battery of his inverter at home, but a search conducted at his residence negated his theory.
“Finally, he gave us the name of his friend who used to work in a repair shop and our police team nabbed him too,” said Balwal, who was recently appointed as SSP (Srinagar) and has worked on various cases in Jammu and Kashmir, including the Pulwama terror attack, during his stint with the National Investigation Agency.
The police had procured CCTV footage from shops around the area where the incident took place to nail the culprits in the case, he said.